The present invention relates, in general, to a method for controlling railway signal installations of a railway system.
Nothing in the following discussion of the state of the art is to be construed as an admission of prior art.
Transmitter/receiver devices, also referred to as transceivers, are commonly used to transmit data via the rail for controlling railway signal installations. The transceivers are connected to the two electrically conducting rails of the track, wherein the transmit cycles and the receive cycles alternatingly repeat for each of the transceivers. Data are transmitted by signal pulses exchanged between directly adjacent transceivers via DC-encoded DC circuits. The rails include electrically insulated rail joints (also referred to as mechanical insulated joints), so that the respective transceivers located in a region between two directly adjacent rail joints can exchange the data without interference from the more distant transceivers.
The use of insulated joints is expensive and susceptive to errors. In particular, repairs performed on the insulated joints may cause unacceptable train delays.
It would therefore be desirable and advantageous to provide an improved method for data transmission over the rails, which method obviates prior art shortcomings and which is prone to little error and cost-efficient.